The federal Office of Child Support Enforcement itself has said that “the average incarcerated parent with a child support case has $10,000 in arrears when entering state prison, and leaves with $20,000 in arrears. Not only is this debt unlikely to ever be collected, but it adds to the barriers formerly incarcerated parents face in reentering their communities.”

Just scanning comments on this subject, there is a distressingly large number of people who accept the principle that the system should extract as much money as possible from the dad, but no more. Those who favor less punitive measures usually just make the argument they would extract more money.

And there are a distressing number of man-haters who are happy to punish the man. They say he won't produce more illegitimate kids while in jail.

I once an interview of a college president who argued that the colleges should be able to extract as much money as possible from the parents of students. Well, she did not phrase it that way, but she strenuously argued that it was unjust that a student might attend a different college because he got a better financial deal. She wanted the colleges to have an exemption from anti-trust law so that they could collude in price-fixing tuition, and prevent students from shopping around different colleges.

Obamacare is also based on using income information to extract as much money as you can be reasonably expected to pay for pre-paid medical care.

And taxation schemes are usually designed to extract as much money as possible

We are told that what we pay for college or medical care has very little to do with actual costs. And child support is designed to have almost nothing to do with child costs.

I don't agree with any of this. Colleges and medical providers should have to compete. A man should have the choice of paying child support or taking care of the kid himself.